tl;dr: I need to increase worker_connections on my nginx servers, but don't want to edit the debian-provided nginx.conf due to that causing future upgrade hassles. Is this possible?
Long version: I've got a couple servers running a somewhat convoluted web app deployment, with nginx at the front end. Every so often, one of the nginx instances will lock up and start logging "768 worker_connections are not enough" messages on every request. After some searches and double-checking that there aren't any loops in my nginx config, I've come to the conclusion that 768 is an absurdly low default for production servers - one source said that "over 9000" is appropriate for most sites that see significant traffic. So I'm thinking I should probably raise it. However, when I tried raising it from conf.d, nginx failed to start, with the error [emerg] 25402#25402: "events" directive is not allowed here in /etc/nginx/conf.d/mysite.conf:1 conf.d/mysite.conf contains only: --- events { worker_connections 10240; # multi_accept on; } --- I also tried moving that config file to modules-enabled/ and it at least gave me a different error message: [emerg] 14914#14914: "events" directive is duplicate in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:6 so it apparently accepted my events block, then choked on the default one. Is there any way to accomplish this using only new files of my own creation, while leaving all debian-provided config files in a pristine state? I know I could change it directly in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, but a) That would potentially generate conflicts with new debian-provided versions of nginx.conf whenever the package is upgraded b) My site-specific config files are generated from templates, meaning that I'd then need to keep the template in sync with any debian- provided changes, or go outside the existing system and have to remember to manually tweak nginx.conf every time I make a new server or upgrade an existing one and I would greatly prefer a one-time change which doesn't lead to either of those ongoing maintenance concerns. -- Dave Sherohman